The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 17

ZIEGLER’S INFATUATION WITH INSECTS DIFFERED STRIKINGLY from Nazi doctrine. Obsessed with pest control, the Third Reich funded many research projects before and during the war that focused on insecticides, rat poisons, and clever ways to foil wood-eating beetles, clothes moths, termites, and other banes. Himmler had studied agriculture in Munich, and favored such entomologists as Karl Friederichs, who sought ways to stop the spruce sawfly and similar insect pests, while justifying Nazi racist ideology as a form of ecology, a “doctrine of blood and soil.”[46] From this perspective, killing people in occupied countries and replacing them with Germans served both political and ecological goals, especially if one first planted forests to change the climate, as suggested by Nazi biologist Eugene Fischer.

Seen through an electron microscope (invented in Germany in 1939), a louse looks like a pudgy long-horned devil with bulging eyes and six snaring arms. A military scourge in 1812, the bug vanquished Napoleon’s Grande Armee en route to Moscow, a legend only recently confirmed by scientists. “We believe that louse-borne diseases caused much of the death of Napoleon’s army,” Didier Raoult, of the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille, reported in the January 2005 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, based on an analysis of tooth pulp from soldiers’ remains discovered in 2001 by construction workers in a mass grave near Vilnius, Lithuania. As body lice transmitted the agents of relapsing fever, trench fever, and epidemic typhus, Napoleon’s Grand Army dropped from 500,000 to 3,000, mainly through pestilence. Friedrich Prinzing’s Epidemics Resulting from Wars,[47] published in 1916, tells the same tale, and also points out that more men died from lice-borne diseases in the American Civil War than on its battlefields. By 1944, the Germans had medicine to reduce the severity of typhus, but not a reliable vaccine. Nor did the U.S. military, which could only offer its troops repeated typhus inoculations that lasted just a few months.

Inside the Ghetto, crowded apartment buildings quickly became hovels ravaged by tuberculosis, dysentery, and famine, and typhus plagued the Ghetto with high fever, chills, weakness, pain, headaches, and hallucinations. Typhus, a catchall name given to similar diseases caused by Rickettsiae bacteria, derives from the Greek word typhos, “smoky” or “hazy,” limning the mental blur of the sufferer, who, after a few days, develops a rash that gradually covers the whole body. Since lice spread the disease, jamming people into a Ghetto made epidemic inevitable, and in time typhus grew so rife that, passing on the street, people kept their distance for fear of lice jumping onto them. The few doctors, doling out sympathy and care in the absence of medicine and nutrition, knew recovery depended solely on age and overall health.

This led naturally to the image of virulent, lice-ridden Jews. “Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing,” Himmler told his SS officers on April 24, 1943. “Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness…. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.”[48]

As early as January 1941, Warsaw’s German Governor Ludwig Fischer reported that he chose the slogan “JEWS—LICE—TYPHUS” to emblazon 3,000 large posters, 7,000 small posters, and 500,000 pamphlets, adding that “the Polish press [under German patronage] and the radio have shared in the distribution of this information. In addition, the children in Polish schools have been warned of the danger every single day.”[49]

Once the Nazis recategorized Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs as nonhuman species, the image of themselves as hunters naturally followed, with shooting parties at country manors and mountain resorts that prepared the Nazi elite, through blood sport, for the grander hunt. They had other models to choose from, of course, including knights and doctors, but hunter offered the manly metaphors of angling, hounding, baiting, trapping, gutting, ratting, and so on.

The specter of contagion clearly unnerved the Nazis. Posters often caricatured Jews with ratlike faces (rat fleas being the primary carriers of plagues), and this imagery insinuated itself even into the psyche of some Jews, like Marek Edelman, a leader of the Ghetto Uprising, who recalled being en route to an Underground meeting when he was “seized by the wish not to have a face,” lest someone recognize and denounce him as a Jew. What’s more, he saw himself with

In the bell-jar politics of Ghetto society, rife with social contrasts, criminals and collaborators thrived while others starved, and an underworld of bribery and racketeering arose. German soldiers regularly dished out violence, stole possessions, and grabbed people for backbreaking and humiliating jobs, until, as one resident of the Ghetto wrote, “when the three horsemen of the Apocalypse summoned by the invader—pestilence, famine, and cold—proved no match for the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the knights of the SS were called to complete the task.”[51] According to German figures, they shipped 316,822 people from Warsaw to concentration camps between early 1942 and January 1943. Since they also shot many people in the Ghetto, the real death count rose much higher.

Aided by friends on the Aryan side, tens of thousands of Jews managed to escape from the Ghetto before the war ended, but some famously stayed, such as Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Ghetto’s Hasidic rabbi. Shapira’s hidden sermons and diary, unearthed after the war, reveal a tigerish struggle with faith, a man wedged between his religious teachings and history. How could anyone reconcile the agony of the Holocaust with Hasidism, a dancing religion that teaches love, joy, and celebration? Yet one of his religious duties was healing the suffering of his community (not an easy task given the suffering and with all the trappings of piety outlawed). Some scholars gathered at a shoe repair shop and discussed holy texts as they cut leather and hammered in nails, and Kiddush ha-Shem, the principle of service to God, acquired a new definition in the Ghetto, where it became “the struggle to preserve life in the face of destruction.” A similar word arose in German—überleben—which meant “to prevail and stay alive,” a defiant point underscored by its being an intransitive verb.

Shapira’s Hasidism included transcendent meditation, training the imagination and channeling the emotions to achieve mystical visions. The ideal way, Shapira taught, was to “witness one’s thoughts to correct negative habits and character traits.” A thought observed will start to weaken, especially negative thoughts, which he advised students not to enter into but examine dispassionately. If they sat on the bank watching their stream of thoughts flow by, without being swept away by them, they might achieve a form of meditation called hashkatah: silencing the conscious mind. He also preached “Sensitization to Holiness,” a process of discovering the holiness within oneself. The Hasidic tradition included mindfully attending to everyday life, as eighteenth-century teacher Alexander Susskind taught: “When you eat and drink, you experience enjoyment and pleasure from the food and drink. Arouse yourself every moment to ask in wonder, ‘What is this enjoyment and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?’”[52]

The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (and in the 1960s, a vocal activist for integration). In prose full of koan-like paradoxes, epigrams, and parallels (“Man is a messenger who forgot the message,” “Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds,” “The search of reason ends at the shore of the known,” “The stone is broken, but the words are alive,” “To be human is to be a problem, and the problem expresses itself in anguish”), he felt “loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the commonplace,” and that it’s “in doing the finite [we] may perceive the infinite.” “I have one talent,” he wrote, “and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don’t be old. Don’t be stale.”

Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world’s Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets. “In my youth, growing up in a Jewish milieu,” Heschel wrote of his childhood in Warsaw, “there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique.”

The etymology of the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, combines three processes: navach (to cry out), nava (to gush or flow), and navuv (to be hollow). The task of this meditation was “to open the heart, to unclog the channel between the infinite and the mortal,” and rise into a state of rapture known as mochin gadlut, “Great Mind.” “There is only one God,” Hassidic teacher Avram Davis writes,

The weak, sick, exhausted, hungry, tortured, and insane all came to Rabbi Shapira for spiritual nourishment, which he combined with leadership and soup kitchens. How did he manage such feats of compassion while staying sane and creative? By stilling the mind and communing with nature:

All our senses feed the brain, and if it diets mainly on cruelty and suffering, how can it remain healthy? Change that diet, on purpose, train mentally to refocus the mind, and one nourishes the brain. Rabbi Shapira’s message was that, even in the Ghetto, common people could temper their suffering in this way, not just monks, ascetics, or rabbis. It’s especially poignant that he chose for meditative practice the beauty of nature, because for most people in the Ghetto nature lived only in memory—no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto—and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body’s rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom. As one Ghetto inhabitant wrote:

Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.